Mojave Finder’s Preview Column Shouldn’t Prioritize Thumbnail Size
Mojave puts a lot of information at your fingertips in Finder windows. However, the priority given to different components isn’t currently right. In particular, too much vertical space is reserved for QuickLook thumbnails (icons).
Even in a very deep Finder window in Column mode, a shallow QuickLook thumbnail is given so much space that you have to scroll in order to be able to see that file’s metadata and the Quick Actions bar below it. This is in a Finder window on a 5K display at ‘looks like 2880 x 1620’ mode: it gets much worse on a laptop.
This is in response to some tweets of mine. I like to use two relatively short (but wide) Finder windows stacked on top of each other. With this arrangement, I can’t see any of the metadata list (dates, the app version, image dimensions) without scrolling unless I hide the Quick Actions. There’s no way to hide the preview, make it smaller, or replace it with just an icon.
Update (2019-01-28): Another issue is that it’s hard to scroll to see the metadata because the swipe scrolling gesture is inoperative when the cursor is over the thumbnail. So you have to find the little strip of the window below the thumbnail but above the Quick Actions and scroll that.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
I don't think there's any system wide preference to hide quick actions, right? I've been hiding them one-off every time I see them obscuring file metadata. I can't express how much crappier this makes using Finder.
Holy Cow I'm glad I'm not the only one that hates these. It's been driving me bonkers! I had to make super long finder windows to be able see the metadata because that stupid quick action button is there. People keep talking about disabling them per file extension but I see no way to do that. Where is it?
@Matt: Try selecting a file type in the Finder and choosing "Show Preview Options" from the View menu. It has checkboxes to show/hide filetype-specific metadata as well as the Quick Actions.
